The Main Activities of My Life in Several Posts

[I] Woodwork and Philosophy

   Until I became dean of the College of Arts and Science at Northwestern at the age of 47, the two dozen or so years after college were devoted to two main occupations: philosophy and woodwork. Woodwork was the earliest. I was really young when I started, back in Heidelberg, with projects for a Laubsäge, a fretsaw, encouraged by my mother who held that working with your hands was a good thing.

   Woodwork continued with shop in junior high school in New York, where I became particularly fond of woodturning and produced a number of projects, some quite fancy. These experiences led me to apply to Brooklyn Tech, an all-city high school. There I took the Mechanical Course for its shops, though most of those turned out to be concerned with metal rather than wood.

   After high school came a year in the Navy, followed by three at Columbia College. It was a time that kept me away from woodwork, but introduced me to philosophy. The college had no majors in those days; instead, one had to earn a certain number of  so-called Maturity Credits to be prevented from taking an excess of introductory courses. Given this scheme, I took enough courses in philosophy to graduate with honors in that subject.

   But that was not the end of it. I spent a year traveling in Europe, courtesy of a Henry Evans Travelling Fellowship  awarded by Columbia to my close friend Carl Hovde and me. When I returned, I applied for an advertised job with the Voice of America that, alas, the government never funded. When I visited the chairman of the philosophy department at the end of the summer of my return, just to say “hello,” he gave me a little lecture. “Rather than shelving books in the library,” a job I could actually get, “why don’t you sign up for graduate work in philosophy?”

   Professor Gutmann, that department chairman, put his money where his mouth is. Without consulting a committee, he awarded me a small fellowship and instructed the graduate admissions officer to admit me to Columbia’s Graduate School.

   That was in 1951. With a two-year interruption, I was a graduate student until 1959 when I received my doctorate and left for my first full time teaching job as assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State College (as it was then). With this paragraph I conclude the story of how philosophy came into my life. So, back to woodwork.

    I actually never really stopped. I got some small pieces of handsome wood, such as purplish Brazilian rosewood and greenish lignum vitae, and, sitting at the kitchen table, carved pieces of jewelry. Not an unqualified success, not only because of their somewhat clumsy appearance, but because of their weight. However, things soon got better.

   After our first San Francisco year in a rented house, we were able to buy an old but solid one, where I was able to set up a shop in the basement. After a year or so, philosophy came to the aid of my woodwork. (Yes, really!) When the Wesleyan University Press published my doctoral dissertation, they generously, gave me an advance of $350 (equal to $488 in 2016). Rather then buying a better couch for the living room and with the blessings of my wife, Fannia, I invested the entire windfall in a Shopsmith, a multipurpose woodworking tool that includes, above all, a lathe.

   So, from 1959 until 1974, my chief occupations were teaching philosophy and writing in the field—another book and a dozen or so articles. (I also got a taste of academic administration—the subject of a later post—by serving as chairperson of the philosophy departments of San Francisco State and Vassar College.)

   But that Shopsmith also got a workout. I kept it humming—or rattling—mostly but not exclusively—with turning project, producing bowls, plates or trays, candlesticks—all from different woods and in different sizes. I think I spent almost as much time in my shop as I did in my study.

   My recalling this last fact the other day led me to ask the question as to whether my devoting so much time and energy to working in wood wrongly detracted from my pursuing my career in philosophy, which was after all my profession in the most obvious way in that it was the way I earned my living. Surprisingly, I had never thought about it before, but I now have and have arrived at something of an answer.

   Let me begin with the easy part. I always prepared carefully for my classes. I was a good teacher; certainly not a great one. (To achieve the status of the latter, as I have written elsewhere, more is needed than a solid grasp of the material to be taught and conscientious attention to pedagogy.) I was much helped by the fact that we were not a high powered graduate department, but only taught courses up to the level of a master’s degree.

   This last fact also made a huge difference concerning  what is usually just called “research,” consisting in philosophy of scholarship and/or writing articles and books on subjects of current philosophical issues. My modest output, summarized above, would not, in several ways, have been adequate in a decent university philosophy department, but it was greater than that of the average of the San Francisco State College faculty. Yet it must also be said that my talent for philosophy was a quite limited one. What I wrote was adequate; the articles are in refereed journals. But there are no signs there of deep insights or of significant originality. As is revealed by the casual way in which I launched into graduate work, I was not driven to be a philosopher.

   Not surprisingly, I did not have any ambitions to change the level of the station in which I found myself. Moreover, I valued my freedom to engage in pursuits of several kinds.
   A final word on woodwork. From the time I arrived at Vassar until I left for Mexico, 44 years later, most of my work with wood was sculpting. I don't know how many such piece I produced; I was terrible about keeping track of them. Some are in Mark's house, others are here in Mexico, but a much larger number was given away, some to friends, many "sold" (for a song) to people I did not even know. Fifty of them were hanging around the house when I was packing up for Mexico. I do not have pictures of all of them and the photos I do have are, disorderly, in different boxes. My shabby treatment of this trove is one of my great regrets. It is an unfortunate function of the fact that I have a much greater interest in making things than in possessing them.

Coda

   I have engaged in three different kinds of activties, in addition to woodwork and philosophy.  From the middle of my teens, I became an aficionado of classical music, with choral singing for many years my only active participation. Writing early became an occupation almost for its own sake and after my decade and a half stint as professor of philosophy, administration in the academic world was my main occupation almost until I retired at the age of 67. I have not yet written about these activities, but before long, an account of them will follow this post.